Good News and Bad 'News'
The meltdown of the 'Santa Barbara News-Press' is a cautionary tale about billionaires buying newspa
Wendy McCaw is hardly the first newspaper proprietor to abuse her position for reasons of personal or political gain, but she may well go down in history as one of the more colorfully incompetent. For a year now - ever since her controversial opinion page editor got himself busted for driving under the influence and triggered an extraordinary concatenation of events - she has driven the Santa Barbara News-Press ever more steadily into the ground.
Most of the senior editors either walked out or got themselves fired last summer. By now, some 60 percent of the staff has followed suit. Local politicians have cried foul, the National Labor Relations Board has filed several complaints, the Society of Professional Journalists and others have lavished awards on the reporters and editors who preferred to quit rather than tolerate her idiosyncratic management style, and many Santa Barbarans have either stopped reading the paper or else watch bemused as it plops on their front lawn anyway even though they long since canceled their subscriptions.
McCaw has proven highly litigious and threatened just about anyone who has dared speak out against her - including the august American Journalism Review, which had the temerity to examine her tenure at the News-Press in uncomfortable detail going back six years, and Jerry Roberts, the executive editor she handpicked three years ago only to have him frog-marched out of the building after he resigned in disgust last summer.
If she figured she could stop people badmouthing her, however, she badly miscalculated. A number of former News-Press staffers have taken up residence at the Santa Barbara Independent, where they write extensively about the continuing outrages at their former place of employment. Several other publications and blogs have become part-time or even full-time News-Press watchers. In a vain and, frankly, pathetic gesture a week ago, the News-Press management made it impossible for employees to open the websites of these offending rival publications from their office computers.
Her most blundering move may also have been her most outrageous - running a front-page story a couple of Sundays ago insinuating that Roberts, the former editor, was somehow responsible for 15,000 pages of Internet porn turning up on a News-Press computer. The piece was the most blatant hit-job imaginable, not least because it appeared without a byline and featured no serious response from Roberts other than a passing mention of the fact that he denied the charge. "News-Press seeks exam of computer used by ex-editor Roberts containing child porn," the headline read.
Only a very careful reading of the piece revealed that the police department, which has been investigating the matter for several weeks, has no idea which editor or reporter might have downloaded the material and do not even exclude the possibility that it was already on the computer when the News-Press acquired it.
Roberts, who has spent the winter fighting cancer of the spleen, is now threatening a massive libel suit, which he stands a very good chance of winning. He has already sued McCaw and her publishing company for $10 million over the circumstances of his departure, and McCaw has counter-sued for $25 million. Ugly doesn't even begin to describe the deteriorating slugfest.
That said, this isn't primarily a tale about First Amendment rights and journalistic ethics being trampled among the hillside mansions and sunkissed vistas of Santa Barbara, or not primarily. In this part of the world, after all, people are savvy, and rich, enough to get all the news they need from a multiplicity of sources. Rather, it's a tale of billionaires gone wild, and utterly failing to grasp that, in the digital age, it's no longer possible to use a newspaper to run a town like the Chandlers did in Los Angeles a century ago.
Wendy McCaw didn't make her own money. Rather, she acquired it in a messy divorce from the vastly successful cell phone magnate Craig McCaw a decade ago. She spent roughly 10 per cent of her billion-dollar fortune buying the News-Press in 2000 - a move that was hailed at the time as a coup for independent newspaper publishing because the Knight-Ridders and Gannetts were kept at bay.
From the start, though, the joke around Santa Barbara was that McCaw had bought the paper for the express purpose of keeping herself out of it. Like other small-town paper owners, she made sure that negative publicity about herself (for example, a fight over easements and beach access at her clifftop mansion) was minimized within her own publication. Like others, too, she made sure her pet enthusiasms - an apt description in her case because she is crazy about animals - got a plentiful airing.
Then she started pushing things too far. She struck up a relationship with the News-Press's restaurant critic, Arthur von Weisenberger, known around town as Nipper, and elevated him to the position of co-publisher. When the scabrous editorial page editor, Travis Armstrong, was arrested for drunk driving and the story appeared on page three of the paper, she threw a fit, accusing Roberts and his deputies of waging a personal vendetta against Armstrong in the news pages.
A news story on Armstrong's conviction (four days in the slammer and a $1,600 fine) was killed and, since McCaw and Nipper were off to the Mediterranean on a cruise, Armstrong was named acting publisher in their absence. That was when the resignations began in earnest - also fueled by a ludicrous complaint from
actor Rob Lowe that the address of his proposed new mega-mansion in Montecito was made public by the newspaper (having previously been given out at a televised public meeting).
When Roberts quit, Armstrong personally escorted him out of the building, prompting a chorus of "Fuck you, Travis!" from incensed staffers as he passed. More protests followed: a rally in De la Guerra Plaza, outside the News-Press offices; a unionization drive resulting in a 33-6 vote in favor that management has refused to honor; and a boycott drive culminating in a banner being hung from the 101 freeway reading "Cancel your newspaper today." That action prompted the dismissal of seven more staffers, including the popular sports columnist John Zant, who had a wide local following.
Residents clamoring for his reinstatement posted "McCaw obey the law!" signs in the windows of their homes and businesses, only to be slapped with cease-and-desist letters from McCaw's lawyers.
The National Labor Relations Board intervened in February in an effort to uphold the union vote - which McCaw and her lawyers argued was conducted unlawfully. A labor board judge, William L. Schmidt, found in favor of the employees and accused management of "extreme embellishments" and "incendiary rhetoric" in its testimony. That ruling is still under appeal.
One would think such craziness would have to stop sooner or later, but that may not be the case. McCaw seems impervious to her own growing unpopularity, or to the responsibilities of running a newspaper that is both ethically run and perceived to be so by its core readership. She has enough money - and, it seems, a thick enough skin - to continue to be impervious for quite a while.
The moral of the story is clear enough. Beware of egocentric billionaires bearing gifts. In other words, if any of the wildly rich men vying for the L.A. Times actually gets his hands on it - watch out.
Published: 05/03/2007
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